Club Rollei User – Issue 10

Our first postal auction listing is annexed separately. This is an exciting event and there here are some interesting items on offer. I hope that this will be successful. Being computerised, I tend to watch items on eBay, mainly to keep an eye on the prices achieved for Rollei items. It is quite clear that the economic squeeze has resulted in a fall in prices over that last year or so. This effects us in two ways: firstly in a negative way, that the Rollei collection that we are sitting on has fallen in value; as too has the value of our houses, cars and savings, but there is nothing we can do about that.

On the positive side though, those items of Rollei paraphernalia, that we have been long seeking are being brought to the market, as people thin out their collections. I have recently seen a number of Rolleiflex 2.8F s and Tele-Rolleis on eBay and when looking at the reserves in our postal auction, the prices are very comparable to the winning bids on eBay. Another aspect to this current economic state is that we can take the opportunity to acquire, at a reasonable cost, a less than cosmetically perfect second camera to have as a ‘user’ and to keep the quality one for ‘Sunday best’.

Most cameras have an optimal field of use. By which I mean, a Rolleicord is not the ideal camera to take to a football match nor an SL66 to take on a hiking holiday in the Alps. So now we can acquire a baby Rollei 35 for that hiking trip and an SL35 for the football match. Additionally, for portraits of the family, a Tele-Rollei is not so out-of-reach now either. On the following page I have written a quick how to.... article. I am sure that you may find yourselves in a similar situation to myself, having many, many negatives and no quick method of scanning through them. Although it is great to have large prints of the good ones, the failures also hold many memories. We do not want to boast of our ‘might have beens’ but they are all part our photographic heritage and not only do they often bring out a chuckle, some may even stir you into having another go at a project that time did not permit further experimentation at the time. It has been suggested that we hold a March/spring meeting as well as the Autumn meeting. Are there any comments or suggestions on this? Please let me know